Elysium Therapeutics Secures $7.5M SAFE Round to Combat Synthetic Opioid Overdoses
Elysium Therapeutics is not a name you hear shouted. It is one you hear whispered by people who have spent decades inside pharma boardrooms, regulatory halls, and emergency rooms where time is measured in breaths. Based in Lyons, Colorado and founded in May 2013, the company was built for a problem that does not trend until it kills enough people to force attention. Synthetic opioid overdoses, especially oral fentanyl, are not a policy debate inside Elysium. They are a chemistry problem that refuses to be solved by slogans.
Alex Greg Sturmer and Dr. Thomas E. Jenkins have been building companies together for twenty-five years, across three ventures, long before opioid safety became a headline category. Alex Greg Sturmer, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder, brings three decades of healthcare finance and dealmaking, including senior roles at Theravance and Signature Therapeutics where capital efficiency was not a buzzword but survival. Dr. Thomas E. Jenkins, Executive Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer, and Co-Founder, is a Stanford trained synthetic organic chemist whose career has been defined by taking known molecules and making them behave differently when it matters most.
On January 28, 2026, Elysium Therapeutics closed a $7.5 million SAFE round. No valuation headlines. No investor name dropping. Just capital aligned to push its lead program, SOOPR, through IND enabling studies and toward an FDA filing in 2026. SOOPR is a proprietary naloxone prodrug designed specifically for oral fentanyl and nitazene overdoses, where current rescue agents often wear off while the opioid keeps working. In preclinical studies, SOOPR showed faster onset and a dramatically longer duration, delivering twelve to twenty-four hours of opioid blockade compared to the one to two hour window clinicians fight with today.
This round stacks on top of roughly $16 million in NIH and NIDA grants and $3 million from Ohio Third Frontier, a signal that public institutions have already pressure tested the science. It also sits alongside real human data from the company’s O2P hydrocodone program, which completed a Phase 1 proof of concept study in 2024 showing reduced overdose exposure while preserving pain relief. That matters because Elysium is not building a single asset company. It is building a safety architecture.
The company runs virtually, keeps burn low, and lets chemistry do the talking. Board members like former FDA Division Director Bob Rappaport and veteran investor Kathy LaPorte do not join projects that rely on hope. They join when the logic holds under scrutiny. Elysium is not chasing noise. It is engineering time back into emergencies, and in this market, time is the only currency that counts.